Scooper on libraries

The Auckland Harbour bridge was opened on 30 May 1959. Auckland City libraries Special Collections have digitised photos and colour slides from 50 years ago when the Auckland Harbour bridge was being built.  Check out the Heritage Images Online database for over 70 photos of the bridge being built.

There is also a physical exhibition The Bridge - spanning the sparkling waters - on the second floor of the Auckland central library from 3 May 2009 to 26 July 2009. Primarily a photographic exhibition, the focus will be on the history of the bridge - from before it was built, to the present day. Colour photographic images of the construction will be showcased.

North Shore Libraries are also featuring the opening with an exhibition and digital photos with an interesting list of facts & figures about the bridge e.g. The toll for cars in 1959 was 2/6 (or 25 cents). By 1971 it was 10 cents. Tolls were finally abolished in 1984 when the AHBA was finally wound up. The bridge is now administered by Transit New Zealand.

At 3pm on Saturday 30th May, Northcote Library on the North Shore will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Harbour Bridge opening in style - to mark the occasion Councillor Tony Holman QSO will be sharing his extensive knowledge of the Northcote area and the Bridge. The talk is to launch a display of "before and after the bridge" photos prepared by the library staff to demonstrate the dramatic change this structure has had on a small seaside  suburb.

The library has a wonderful tool called Journal Finder on its website. You can find out if we have journals, magazines and newspapers either online or in print by title or ISSN .  ISSN is the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), an eight-digit number which identifies periodical publications as such, including electronic serials.

You can search for a specific title, browse them all in alphabetical order or by subject. e.g. if I wanted to read an article from a specific magazine which I had found in a database search or had come across in another magazine, I can search Journal Finder to see the library has that magazine in print or online - if it's available fulltext in an online version, it will tell me which database it is in.

Here's an example of a record for a magazine that is available online:

Quarterly journal of finance and accounting (ISSN 1939-8123)        
from 01/01/1988 to present in ABI/INFORM Global 
from 01/01/2008 to present in Business Source Premier, General OneFile and MasterFILE Premier.

If I click on the link for ABI/INFORM Global, I will be taken to the login page for the ABI/INFORM Global database - I login and it displays all the issues of the journal - the latest one being for Winter 2009.

The library has 34,000 titles of print and online magazines, journals and newspapers which can be found through Journal Finder!

St Deiniol's Library describes itself as the "U.K.'s finest residential library "- I was watching a great tv programme called "Behind closed doors", which delves behind the doors of buildings normally closed to public view in the UK to reveal examples of amazing hidden architecture, and saw a segment on St Deiniol's.

It was founded in 1889 by William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of England in the 1860s-1880s.  In 1895, at the age of 85, Gladstone bequeathed 40,000 Pounds (equivalent to approximately 3.31 million Pounds today)and much of his library to found St Deiniol's Library, the only residential library in Britain. Despite his advanced age, he himself hauled most of his 32,000 books a quarter of a mile to their new home, using his wheelbarrow.

The website says: St Deiniol's has been recognised as the most important research library and collection in Wales after the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. The Library boasts an outstanding collection of more than 250,000 books, journals and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects but specialising in our core subject areas of Theology and Victorian Studies. This unique collection is kept up-to-date with the latest publications which readers can browse on the open shelves.

The heart of the Library is Gladstone's own collection of over 32,000 items. Many of his books contain his annotations, some of which are extremely detailed. In addition to his books, the Library houses most of Gladstone's non-political correspondence, speeches and papers which are administered by the Flintshire Record Office.

You can stay overnight or plan a short retreat for some personal study time. Costs are 45 Pounds per night, dinner bed and breakfast, with cheaper rates for students and clergy!

St Deiniol's is located in the picturesque village of Hawarden, Wales, just 10 minutes drive from Chester - check out the pictures of "bed, board and books", "a health farm for the mind", and "a tranquil and inclusive retreat" - sounds wonderful...

At last, three major US library groups have come out about the Google Books settlement. The American Library Association (ALA), Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) and Association of Research Libraries (ARL), representing over 139,000 libraries and 350,000 librarians are not opposed to the settlement per se, as the settlement has the potential to provide public access to millions of books.

However, many of the features of the settlement, including absence of competition for the new digital library services of this scale and what they call the creation of an  "essential facility with concentrated control", could compromise fundamental library values including:

• equity of access to information,
• patron privacy: will the privacy of what the public access be protected
• intellectual freedom where some books deemed to be 'inappropriate' by organisations or countries could be excluded
• preservation of access to all items in their entirety

The cost of an institutional subscription could also skyrocket, as academic journal subscriptions have over the past two decades. The institutional subscription could be affordable by only the largest libraries, and, of course, the single public access terminal in a public library is grossly insufficient in most libraries and could lead to further inequities.

The settlement could also frustrate the development of innovative services because although the settlement allows the proposed Registry to license rights to third parties, it does not require it to do so.

The ALA etc says that the court can mitigate these possible negative effects by regulating the conduct of Google and the Book Rights Registry the settlement establishes. 

The filing deadline for comments to the judge was recently extended by four months from May 5th to September 4th 2009 - commentators believe the delay will give the U.S. Department of Justice more time to consider the antitrust issues that critics of the deal have raised.